July 11, 2007

In his concurrence, Justice Anthony Kennedy opened up a new avenue for educational justice by contending that other methods of achieving integration — like revising school attendance zones — are constitutionally permissible so long as they do not sort and label individual children by race.

Congress has an opportunity to take advantage of the opening created by Justice Kennedy later this year when it reauthorizes the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The law gives children the right to transfer from a low-performing school to a high-performing school if the low-performing school has failed to demonstrate adequate improvement two years after being warned of its shortcomings.

Unfortunately, the transfer provision has until now been a bust. Less than 3 percent of eligible children have been able to transfer, in part because of the scarcity of space in high-performing schools within most urban districts. Although the law does not prohibit transfers between urban and suburban schools, it offers no inducements to the states to make this possible.

Democrats in the Senate should therefore introduce an amendment to authorize and make easier cross-district transfers — not on a specifically race-conscious basis, but solely to fulfill the professed intention of the law.

Exactly how did Justice Kennedy create a new opening for this solution? It's been available all along, hasn't it? The most you can say is that the case has generated some new energy over the issue of school integration and that Congress could harness this energy to impose new requirements on state and local government.

It seems to me that the uniform national solution to a problem comes into play when the work of local government can be impugned. That's not the case here. It's exactly the opposite.

And why assume that there is a one-size-fits-all response to the Supreme Court's limitation and that you know what it is? Isn't this exactly the situation where you want decentralized efforts by local government that are fine-tuned to local conditions and preferences and that can serve as useful experiments for us all to learn from?

Include failing teachers in that check writing proposition as well as school districts that have turned many urban schools into work projects for semi-literate teachers. Also, include bureacratic school administrators looking for lucrative deals with publishing companies, guaranteed revenue from increased property taxes, no accountability on literacy scores (teachers and students) or budgeting, teaching languages other than english, ie. eubonics and spanish, and reliance on ADA, average daily attendance.

The so-called 'Nanny state' is alive and well in the gigantic welfare/education, Jaba The Hut bureaucracy that feeds on the taxpayer at the expense of the children it is supposed to serve.

The latest examply of this crime against the taxpayer is the recent imbroglio down in Texas. One teenaged girl failed to make the cut for Junior Varsity Cheerleading and is threatening to sue the district.

Do we really need to continue to be concerned about intergration? I live in the south and can assure you that little if any discrimination occurs as a consequence of race. No one really cares who lives next door or who there children go to school with in terms of race. Now there is considerable discrimination based on other factors. Those factors are basically the character of an individual that makes them a negative social unit. So if your child or parents are bullies, intentionally ignorant, dirty, slouthfull, etc. then the community has a tendency to avoid them. We have even begun to accept Yankees.

But our schools are truly sick. This is a conbination of poor teachers and poor parents and excessive government influence. I feel that the only remedy for this is the concept of a voucher system plus minimizing government influence.

Sloanasaurus said... "One idea is to make welfare checks contingent on the performance of their kids in school or at least make the checks contingent on their kids behavior in schools. There could be a new phrase created: "No parenting, no check!"

I see. So welfare equates to performance. So poor moms are to blame for kids failing...so we'll just punish them a little more..Does that make sense to you? Really?...How about we just starve poor kids who underproduce in school. We could hang them..better yet, for every F on the report card we could chop off a limb...sound good to you?

of course you want to keep the government out of the mechanizations of private life...so we could just let the schools do it...principal, dean of students, torturer, executioner...nice administration.

I want decentralized efforts; so do you. But there are quite a few (including, perhaps, Kozen) who either don't want decentralization at all, or who only want it if it doesn't matter--i.e. as long as the decentralized decision-makers don't make decisions contrary to The Grand Plan.

I wonder what our humble Professor has to say about the degree of literacy among her erstwhile students. Even though computers correct most spelling errors, I can only imagine the horror of inappropriate/incorrect use of syntax, composition, and failure to produce a simple page of english prose free of most writing errors.

It is not my desire to offend the sensibilites of any of her students. I can only hope that the results of their education is worth the money it cost to get them to their current level of literacy.

Going to school outside the Seattle School District is an excellent idea. Just about every kid in Bellevue or Redmond has chance to get a good education. The University of Washington keeps track of student performance by high school in Washington. The statistics show the difference between the suburban schools and the city schools. And why Seattle parents were willing to fight to have their kids go to Ballard HS, Nathan Hale HS or Roosevelt HS. These are the only decent schools in the district.

As a physician, I take care of a large number of indigents and those on welfare (I work at LSU). As such, I see first hand what the environment is for the children that you are talking about. The isn't a single, simple remedy. The parents are not educated in the least, they do not understand the value of reading, they have no idea where their children are even late at night. This culture of people is stuck in the ghetto and due to their lack of knowledge have no idea as to how to get out. This translates to poor preformance by their children and a general lack of ability to guide them and certainly an inability to keep them from gangs and other bad influences. I feel that this is fostered by our government. The well meaning social programs seem only to eat up money and do not produce people that can begin to make a significant difference in their ability to climb up the ladder to success. That is what we are seeing in the schools and this effects even those children from families in better circumstances. If you notice, people are trying to get their kids as far away from this social element as they can if they can. But the social element is only getting worse and does not seem to improve. The schools are not helping these children to leave their poor environment as the policiticans do not really care to affect that change.

We saw a good example of this with Katrina. You saw first hand people that were so used to the government taking care of them that they couldn't even figure out how to get water in a distroyed city. To improve our schools we need to change that social environment and we will need to say things to special interest groups that they do not want to here, very much like what Bill Cosby has preached.

In addition, the bad teachers need to go. Even if their union does not agree. In fact that would be the first step is to get rid of the Union.

The next step is teaching basics. Many of the kids I teach in medical school can do well of a standardized test, but have few other skills. The emphasis in school seems to be at teaching to these test. This is a complaint I have heard from other professors and they are very much against the "No Child Left Behind" law.

I see. So welfare equates to performance. So poor moms are to blame for kids failing...so we'll just punish them a little more..Does that make sense to you? Really?...

Why not? We already do when it comes to attendence. One of my extra jobs is dealing with kids who have chronic problems that are keeping them from being successful. One area I deal with is attendence. Every year there are dozens of kids who are chronically absent, often with parents covering for them. It's amazing how their attendence problems clear up once the process has reached the point where the state is going to either start docking the parents welfare checks or start levying fines.

Are their bad teachers? Sure. But believe it or not the rest of us do do what we can to get rid of them. They make our job harder, and also believe it or not most of us are teachers because we really care about the kids. The biggest problem in education today are bad parents. These come in two types.

1)Those who support disruptive students against the school. (We actually had restraining orders against three violent parents last year)

One of my extra jobs is dealing with kids who have chronic problems that are keeping them from being successful. One area I deal with is attendence. Every year there are dozens of kids who are chronically absent, often with parents covering for them. It's amazing how their attendence problems clear up once the process has reached the point where the state is going to either start docking the parents welfare checks or start levying fines.

Yeah, middle- and upper-class parents NEVER have kids who are chronically late to school. Or truant. Who who have drug problems.

Criminal defense attorneys find that way too many of our clients are offspring of welfare households. Often, client attitudes and behavior are hard to comprehend, much less defend, until you meet the mother. Some are totally disengaged from their children, some have no idea of how to set boundaries, others actively encourage confrontational behavior.

Linking welfare payments to participation in parenting or life-skills classes might do more than any number of school transfers to get better educational outcomes.

Even in the old days, even in a small school, even by running for the school board for no other purpose than to fire an inept teacher... bad teachers often *can't* be fired.

Here's my solution for the problem of education.

Many small schools combined with complete school choice.

Why do we have these huge campuses in enormous school districts with superintendents who get paid obscene salaries?

Students, particularly students who might not do well in school, need a rather basic set of skills and just about any individual teacher is capable of making decisions about how best to develop those skills in that student.

Doesn't take huge facilities. Doesn't take a superintendent who makes six figures. Doesn't take a PhD anyone to figure out how to teach it.

Those now "at risk" would benefit the most from an application of KISS... keep it simple stupid. Small classes and the ability of teachers to make decisions about methods at the classroom level, to have the ability to teach individuals the way each person needs to be taught... which isn't one right way and never can be, no matter how many people are supported by educational research grants.

Sloan -- That is the worst idea I have heard in a very long time. There was an article in The Atlantic not too long ago (by Caitlin Flanagan, I think) about how middle- and upper-class American families are exactly like little factories. The product is excellent children. You can't punish the kids of a poor, uneducated family that way. The idea we have now is a good one, which is to provide a safety net but very tough incentives to get a job.

I have thought for a long time that the American south is more integrated that the American north.

Having said all this, I would guess that the guy who wrote this piece is just using the recent SC decision as a springboard for what he wants. Surely, he understands that there has always been a right to allow students to freely transfer among schools, if only state and local governments could make it so. Perhaps what he wants is to encourage places like Milwaukee and Cleveland to revitalize their innovation now.

But our schools are truly sick. This is a conbination of poor teachers and poor parents and excessive government influence. I feel that the only remedy for this is the concept of a voucher system plus minimizing government influence.

In other words, a recipe for what the Bushies really want -- an end to public schools altogether.

A quick read through Mr. Kozol's op-ed shows that the author of "Death at an Early Age" still thinks it's 1965. Those of you wondering where Mr. Kozol is coming from should read that book. It's pretty disturbing what attitudes white school officials had back then toward Negroes (this WAS 1965 after all, and that word was used in the book title).

But to argue that Brown v. Board of Education is being "dismantled" is plain wrong. One would be hard pressed to find attitudes in school boards these days remotely like those in Boston schools 40 years ago. All those years of court-ordered school desegregation have changed attitudes about de jure segregation permanently.

We're just arguing about how to deal with the fact that public schools attended mostly by minority-group children are in large part abominable. When I read about a white teacher that won a racial discrimination suit for her mistreatment in a black-run public school (i.e. she was abused by the students, whose behavior was excused as being part of "their culture"), the answer ought to be obvious: the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. That means applying objective standards to all students, not jsut curing the disparities in physical plant.

Christopher -- I am interested in seeing you source for your belief that the Bushies really want...an end to public schools altogether.

Naturally, you don't have one. Why make stuff up like that? Why not just admit that you have some disagreements with conservative/libertarian ideas and be done with it? Why lie? Do you think intellectual dishonesty helps your cause?

Why do we have these huge campuses in enormous school districts with superintendents who get paid obscene salaries?

In my experience, largely because of government, especially federal government, mandates. The current mission of public schools goes way beyond education; they have become social welfare systems. However laudable a hot lunch program is, the bureaucracy to manage it alone is simply huge. (And, I should add, the notion that a family of four making $36,000 a year should get subsidized lunches is obscene. Anyone heard of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?)

There's a consensus in America that every child should get an education, but as David Gelernter noted recently in the Weekly Standard, there's no such consensus that public schools need to do the educating.

Really, what would be so terrible about government mandating that every kid has to go to school, and providing subsidies and oversight when necessary, but then getting out of the way?

Milton Friedman noted long ago that the government is bad at providing services — that's why he wanted public schools to be called "government schools" — but that it's good at writing checks. So why not cut checks to people so they can send their kids to school?

What part of that don't you understand as getting rid of public education?

I think the school districts should be free to experiment to see what works. The problem, of course, is that you can't make all of the people happy all of the time.

It makes me wonder whether the states are too big to serve as laboratories of democracy. Colorado townships pass local laws prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals, a contest that cultural conservatives could not win. So, they go to the state level and by a narrow margin amend the state constitution, taking the matter out of the townships' hands. Local school districts come up with innovative new ways to attempt to educate diverse and ghettoized cities, and they're ruled unconstitutional because they take race into account. There's always somebody who is going to take issue with an innovative idea.

Some states, like California, New York, and Texas, have more people than the entire United States at the time the Constitution was ratified. There's a lot of inertia in getting a state of 30 million people to change its laws, especially on a controversial subject. There's always somebody willing to go over somebody else's head to get the next-largest political body (whether than be county, state, or Federal) to overturn an innovative decision they don't agree with. That's one reason why the governments in this country get so little accomplished.

Exactly how did Justice Kennedy create a new opening for this solution? It's been available all along, hasn't it?

According to Jack Balkin, Kennedy's opinion endorsed a few race-conscious but race-neutral methods that had been called into question by some federal appellate judges.

Shouldn't local government respond to the case by trying to devise new programs that take advantage of the advice provided by Justice Kennedy?

Arguably, no. The States are already bound by the 14th Amendment, which guarantees black equality, according to the Slaughter-House Cases. Certainly Congress can prevent caste formation of any racial kind based on the 13th Amendment.

In other words, a recipe for what the Bushies really want -- an end to public schools altogether.

Apparently you didn't live in Texas when Bush was governor. During the 90s he really pushed the annual standardized testing crap that now infects the entire nation. He set higher graduation standards, increased education funding, and if I remember correctly gave public school teachers one of the largest raises they had had in years.

Poor in the sense of "incompetent", yes (although that often goes hand in hand with the financial kind of "poor").

...so we'll just punish them a little more..Does that make sense to you?

Behind almost every lousy student is a lousy parent. The point here is to hit the parents where they hurt, to encourage them -- out of simple, selfish self-interest -- to start actually raising their kids.

That will, yes, also hurt the kids who just happen to naturally be as dumb as a bag of hammers despite having well-meaning parents, but no government program can cover everybody fairly.

Great idea. I think any parent on welfare subsidy should be required to join and support the P.T.A. or whatever 'new-age' touchy-feely name the elites have bestowed on that once venerable institution. The P.T.A. could even do walk-throughs of their school and check the bathrooms for cleanliness, institute hall-monitors using volunteer parents, monitor teachers prone to having sex with students, monitor students prone to having sex with each other, enforce the following codes: no cell phones/PDA's/i-pods, mp3 players, no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes, n swearing, follow-up each absenteeism, not equating acceptable attendance with academic superiority, and zero tolerance for discipline problems.

If they can't hack it for any reason, send them to alternate schools. If they flunk out of that then they give up the right to welfare. They can eat at the local mission and live under a freeway. Girls can receive special education by changing a few diaper loads at dark-thirty in the morning and earn their welfare checks by 'volunteering' for supervised babysitting under the auspices of a background checked adult supervisor at a day care center. Now that's sex education!

This is called "tough love" to every smart ass out there who thinks life is supposed to be fair. As Dirty Harry is fond of saying, "Do you feel lucky punk? Well do you?"

I have an idea that once these self-absorbed, narcissists, including their idiot parents, understand the very real consequences of their actions, most behavior will change for the better.

This is also referred to as discipline and accountability, horror of horrors and "OH! The humanity!" Hopefully we started with Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears.

DB Queen: "How is my concern transparent?When did you become a mind reader?"

Simels isn't a mind-reader. He's hearing voices. These voices tell him that concern for children can only be demonstrated by capitulating to the public-school establishment and the teachers' unions prescriptions for education reform, which essentially equate to more money in their pockets.

People like Simels pimp the poor children of America for the benefit of middle-class, mostly white government employees, and then dare to accuse their critics of being hard-hearted, uncompassionate, and unconcerned with "the children who are, after all, our future."

The question I have for Simels is: Do you know you're doing this? Are you a Democratic Party official who realizes how much money the unions give you, and so you have to repeat their talking points? Or are you just a dupe who can't think for himself?

In city after city, it is minority parents who are the biggest advocates for school choice. But apparently, according to people like Simels, it is racist to pay attention to them.

It's true that a good number of conservatives would like to see the end of public schooling (at least as we know it) in favor of true choice, diversity, and parental control. Mostly they are the libertarian sorts of conservatives.

I've never had the idea that Bush was anything other than a supporter of public school, even if that includes vouchers or charter schools in some minor way. Perhaps I was wrong.

Interestingly, the push for getting out from under government control of education comes from the far reaches in *both* directions. The liberal sorts of alternative schools look very different from the conservative sorts. Schools where children learn and advance at their own pace, work on what they chose to work on, read books sprawled on couches and don't answer to bells vs. uniform wearing children in straight rows of desks listening to a lecture.

The big names in homeschooling (and particularly in *un*schooling) are often the names of liberal thinkers and revolutionaries. Probably *more* than conservatives or Christians. The Christians organize better since they aren't primarily opposing organization.

We'd see more of the secular liberals in alternative education, but mostly they are off doing their own thing. But they are there.

Until the teacher's unions abandon the 'more money, less accountability' mantra or the Democrats divorce themselves from kowtowing to said unions I will find it difficult to vote for any Democrat though as I live in Massachusetts that doesn't do me much good. I think the unions are the single biggest obstacle to improving education.

Pay teachers more? I'm all for it as long as we pay the good teachers more and the bad teachers less or nothing at all.

Standardized tests? Aren't they bad because now teachers 'teach to the test'? What did they teach to before? How did that work out?

(1) World-famous POP MUSIC CRITIC, Mr. Steve Simels, first appeared or became prominent at Chateau Althouse after our hostess likened onion rings to vaginas.

(2) World-famous POP MUSIC CRITIC, Mr. Steve Simels, looked like Gollum thirty years ago and possesses unnaturally long life (the best explanation why he takes POP MUSIC so seriously after all these years. Visit his power pop site if you doubt me).

(3) World-famous POP MUSIC CRITIC, Mr. Steve Simels, is genuinely obsessed with Althouse. She is his ONE RING OF POWER. He can’t stay away and he can’t keep himself secret. The same was true of Gollum: whenever he glimpsed his PRECIOUS, he became mad with lust, envy and nastiness.

(4) Bottom Line: World-famous POP MUSIC CRITIC, Mr. Steve Simels, craves the Althouse vagina and steve simels might just be a genuine stalker; and not in the creepy but relatively harmless internet sense, but in the not-at-all-funny, dangerous, real world sense.

P.P.S. Understand now, Trey, it makes no difference to me who you talk to on the internet. That’s none of my business. All the same, if I were you, I wouldn’t talk to that simels person too much about your little girl. That’s a word to the wise. Just saying.

Sloanasaurus: It doesn't make sense to me that people should receive checks from the government without making some sort of effort.

Here in Wisconsin, Governor Doyle (D) and the farm lobby now have schools feeding public school kids breakfast and lunch. I'm sure feeding them dinner is right around the corner.

Seems to me, if you're not adequately feeding your kid, you should be brought up on charges of child neglect, not enabled by the state with taxpayer-funded meals. And I am curious to know how many of those kids receiving free breakfast and/or lunch are already being subsidized by the state via food stamps.

And oooooh, MM gets the Strange New Federalism Award! Way to go MadMan!!!!

All joking aside, I quite agree with you. So will you join me in calling for the Dept of Education to be abolished? This should of course be accompanied by a tax cut so that states can raise their own education funding in an overall tax-neutral way.

As a practical matter, and this goes for vouchers as well, letting students freely choose schools simply doesn't work. Unless of course you dump everyone into the streets and let it be first come first served until school "a" fills up and you go to school "b" etc. Of course you loose parental involvement in local schools - a key of course - because of the distance factor and of course you loose the continuity because you have to do the same thing every year...but other than that ... someone explain to me exactly how this pie in the sky idea will work...

The parents who want to be involved will be involved in some way, regardless. In my experience, the "involvement" travels. That's one of the reasons, at least locally, why those opposed to open enrollment object. It's not just that they want to lose the enrollment of certain kids, they don't want to lose the involvement of those kids' parents.

"The liberal sorts of alternative schools look very different from the conservative sorts. Schools where children learn and advance at their own pace, work on what they chose to work on, read books sprawled on couches and don't answer to bells vs. uniform wearing children in straight rows of desks listening to a lecture."

Guess which student is more likely to get a good job or even start their own business. I know which one I would hire for my company.

Oh Bissage, you are a hoot. I am trying to become a regular on Steve's excellent music blog. While I sense that I am not yet trusted, (I am indeed a conservative Christian, so I am used to not being trusted) I am hoping that my enthusiasm and stubborn refusal to comment on anything other than music will win them over in time.